[Closed] What do we need Royal Mail for?

what happens if you don't have a computer or internet connection?

[url= http://blog.simplifydigital.co.uk/2009/03/40-of-uk-households-don%E2%80%99t-have-web-access-and-many-of-those-just-don%E2%80%99t-want-it/ ]40% of UK household don't have web access.[/url]

Free suppy of rubber bands?

**Actually, I reckon I must have one of the best posties in Scotland.

Yes, that's the only problem. But how many fall into that category? Certainly no-one on here. And Gordon is going to tax us all 50p per m onth to run broadband out to every home, so the problem will soon pass.

[url= http://blog.simplifydigital.co.uk/2009/03/40-of-uk-households-don%E2%80%99t-have-web-access-and-many-of-those-just-don%E2%80%99t-want-it/ ]40% apparently[/url]

And Gordon is going to tax us all 50p per m onth to run broadband out to every home, so the problem will soon pass.

I find that couriers invariably provide a worse service than RM.

soon? when is soon then? Computers have been around for quite a while and so has the internet, and still only a 60% uptake? Just cos broadband is available to everyone it doesn't mean everyone will use it. Is the govenment going to pay for everyone to have a computer too?. Will there be a point in time where you tell everyone that you will no longer get post, so it's too bad if you don't have a PC.

oh, yes! what about my DVD's by post? 😯

You can't stick 20quid in an online birthday card, and you can't stick it up on ya window sil with all the others, you can't get a stupid badge saying "it's my birthday" to wear down the pub so girls give you hugs and people buy you drinks. first person to send me an e-birthday card gets a reply of 'you lazy ****, let us not bother anymore.'

Also, I prefer to recieve statements and bills in paper form.

Just 'cos technology CAN be used doesn't mean it SHOULD.

I support the postmen!

[i]Is there anything we really cannot manage without posties for? [/i]
who would do the constant moaning and going on strike if we didn't have posties?
We'd have to rely on someone else to go through the mail and nick credit cards out of it too.
Oh, and who would carefully mash your A3 envelope marked 'photos - please do not bend' into an interesting shape so that it will fit through your average letter box?
They provide me with a reason to go to the village, when they deliver a card into my hands saying 'you weren't in, so we'll return your parcel to the post office'.
god bless 'em, they do a wonderful job.

Because couriers avoid residential deliveries at all costs and because the govts stake in RM mean that they have to meet a service/cost level that makes the service accessible for everyone. Once the market were fully privatised prices would go through the roof, just like trains, gas, elec, water and all the other services govts have sold off over the last 30 years in the name of improved competition.

LOL @ ChatsworthMusters !

Yes, that must be why country after country are scrapping their postal services 😀

The Dutch company which wants a piece of Royal Mail's action obviously doesn't realise that postal services are doomed. Although I guess that might be because they fully aware that Royal Mail delivers 75 million letters and parcels every day.

btw, I am not a postal worker. I am however a customer. And as a government owned company, I indirectly have a 'share' in Royal Mail, and it's profits reduce my tax bill. I also feel a sense of social responsibility towards British workers who are fighting to protect their industry against foreign privateers.

Playing devils advocate for a minute, there area few things on your list that you've got a point with.
Sending any sort of mail used to be ridiculously cheap. Since deregulation that mail that people and businesses do have to send has become more expensive. The presence of a national mail provider that provides a fixed one price goes anywhere service has kept even its competitors prices low-and that applies to packet delivery as well- what do you think's gonna happen when we go down the tubes?
I laugh when I hear how we are less relevant than ever, If we are so unnessesary, why are people so ( justifiably) angry just now?
When the postal service is reduced to a mail equivalent of railtrack, all our taxes will be used to prop it up.
BTW can anyone name a country that doesnt have a mail system?

Strikes don't work FACT & all they are doing by having them is p1ssing everyone off & losing public sympathy.Plus they are playing into their hands by having them,remember the NCB strikes & what happened to there.....

You can't stick 20quid in an online birthday card

You can paypal £20 for less than the cost of a stamp...

But anyway, the posties are shooting themselves in the foot by striking. The point abotu striking is that you withold the means of your bosses making money, to make them do what you want. However the RM doesn't make money, it loses it for the Govt. So strikes will drive customers away, making the RM smaller and hence losing less money for the Govt. So strike away lads, show em what you're made of! 🙄

I can't count the number of times I've ordered something on-line and had it posted through the letter box by a postman less than 48 hours later. At no extra delivery cost. There is just no way you'll get this service from anyone else.

Anyone who thinks it is a poor service should think carefully about the alternative. Without the royal mail all the other courier companies will be charging more and making you pick stuff up from a central depot.

Mark my words, its getting sold off after the election. I mean, they are already talking about shareholders if the BBC's sources are to be believed. I'm sure it will end up working as well as all the other privatisations.

Strikes don't work FACT

Actually they do. That's why they occur. If strikes didn't work, then we wouldn't have the most restrictive anti-strike legislation in the western world. It simply wouldn't be necessary.

You can paypal £20 for less than the cost of a stamp...

I'm sure that will make the day of a 6 year old on his birthday to know that his paypal account has been credited with 20 quid 🙄

Strikes don't work FACT

I seem to recall that a few years ago the govt wanted to change the pay and conditions of the judiciary. The judges threatened to go on strike and the govt capitulated. The issue in that case is that there was no alternative and the judge held all the cards. NCB strikes failed as the govt had a national strategy to import coal on the cheap and used the coal strikes as a means to break the unions and turn public opinion against ANY union activity.

You can't stick 20quid in an online birthday card,

You wouldn't seriously put a £20 note in a birthday card would you? It isn't obligatory to give the postie a tip for doing his job (or not).

You wouldn't seriously put a £20 note in a birthday card would you? It isn't obligatory to give the postie a tip for doing his job (or not).

I always used to get money through the post when on my birthday when I was younger, can't ever remember a time when a card wasn't delivered. It's actually nice to get something (even if it's not money) through the post. I get loads of shitty emails every day, what is so special about getting another shitty email on your birthday?

Plus your assumption that all posties are thieves is just wrong.

Plus your assumption that all posties are thieves is just wrong.

Your assumption that I assumed all posties to be thieves is just wrong.

Ace! My dear old nan can just print out the paypal confirmation for me! Then in three or four days time, I might be able to actually have that £20! Suppose I don't really need cash anymore, no point in shops either, now if only my local would accept paypal payments the world would be complete! Maybe I'l suggest it to them, I could set up a paypal tab I suppose.

Also, yep I have recieved cash in the post. I am actually yet to recieve anything that has already been opened, though I do worry about postcards from holiday, don't want the nasty postman having a sneaky read of my business.

It isn't obligatory to give the postie a tip for doing his job (or not).

Was that just an off-topic throw away comment then?

Ah, another postie I presume. Finished your round already? Or just dumped it somewhere?

So you can get the stuff you bought on CRC because you can't be bothered to support a LBS delivered to your place the day after you hit the checkout button?

Virtually all the theft (or dumped mail) Ive have seen in the 4 offices Ive worked at over the years has been commited by temporary,casual workers
Those are the future of the service, Thats what RM would like to implement.

Ah, another postie I presume. Finished your round already? Or just dumped it somewhere?

If that was directed at me, the answer is no, I'm not a postie. Just someone who uses and appreciates the postal service.

having just organised a wedding it would have been a lot harder and more expensive without the royal mail- invites and stuff

and please try and tell the bride to be that an e-invite is a perfectly reasonable alternative to the card she spent months designing, printing and sticking together

Finished your round already? Or just dumped it somewhere?

What a stupid and childish school playground taunt.

😕

Finished your round already?

If we got rid of posties would we suffer? The only time we see our postie is at Xmas when he wishes us Season's Greetings with his hand held out for a tax free payment for doing his job.

I despair of this kind of thinking.

With this approach to public services, in time you'll get the held-to-ransom, only-for-profit crap, overpriced, unpleasant service you deserve and it'll cost you more and give you less.

For what its worth, I seldom see my postman either because I'm at work too. However, he delivers our mail and does his best to deliver packages that won't fit in the letterbox safely. When he can't, he leaves a card and I collect it at my local post office or DO, both of which I can walk to, for no charge. Private couriers seldom bother trying and now have a ruse whereby repeat delivery attempts are chargeable!

A Christmas tip is a pleasant human interaction between my postman (whose name is Gary) and my family - we don't often see him in person to thank him for his services - and is simply part of the bonhomie surrounding Christmas round our way.

I'm sure I could manage without the Royal Mail, but I don't want to. Same goes for lots of things.

Mon the posties!

Personally, I'm pretty sure I don't[i] need[/i] mail delivered to my door. I'd be perfectly content to pick it up from somewhere, ideally at the same time as I got food in or rented some films or whatever. Couple of times a week would be fine. I wonder how much difference that would make to the operating costs of the service?

Bigdummy, you for one, are not going to be unhappy with the future!
Its coming sooner than you think!

The issue is how far people have to go to collect it isn't basically?

If I have to go to a windswept depot on the Croydon bypass then it'll be hopeless, shan't ever bother. If I have to pop into an office on the high street next to the deli and the greengrocer then it could almost be an improvement. (Mrs Goggins, I assume, would get her post picked up by whoever sorts her food shopping, so it shouldn't be the end of the world for her.)

It's hard this. I like post, prefer envelopes to emails, and I've nowt against postmen. But it seems to be true that their business has changed enormously and I, certainly, have no recent experience of it being a marvellous service that I couldn't possibly do without.

I wonder how much difference that would make to the operating costs of the service?

If I have to pop into an office on the high street next to the deli and the greengrocer then it could almost be an improvement.

I bet the queues will be tiny.

I mean, how long can it take to personally hand over (after checking ID) 75 million letters and parcels every day ?

Don't be obtuse. 🙂

What does that fancy word "obtuse" mean BD ? .........Is it something to do with being in touch with reality ?

The issue is how far people have to go to collect it isn't basically?

That's true, but it's the thin end of the wedge isn't it?.

If you get rid of deliveries and ask people to go the the local office, then the offices become too expensive so they close smaller ones down. Then you end up having to go further away and before you know it, you have a 2 hour round trip to get to an office that's only open when you're at work.

Somethings services are worth paying for imo, and Royal Mail is one of those services.

My Father used to be RM management... I think it's something to do with offering a Universal Postal Service

http://www.consumerfocus.org.uk/en/content/cms/post_information/background_briefings/universal_postal_ser/universal_postal_ser.aspx

Without RM you wouldn't be able to send a letter to any address for a flat fee. No Private courier is going to pick up that mantle.

I think you'd go to a model where you rented a PO box in the local office wouldn't you? Your local supermarket or whatever would probably be mad keen to have the boxes as it would bring trade in, so the rental would probably stay reasonably controlled and/or you'd get tie-ins from the junk mail people to subsidise the boxes so that they didn't have to do door-to-door themselves. I'm not sure I see why the point from which you picked up your mail would inevitably get further away, once you'd trimmed back the very substantial costs of door-to-door delivery. If it did turn into a 2 hour round trip then the post would simply die out altogether. You'd never, ever make a trip like that to collect a gas bill afterall. 🙂

I indirectly have a 'share' in Royal Mail, and it's profits reduce my tax bill.

GG, I shall remind you of that point of view when Lloyds/RBS announce record [i]profit[/i]-based bonus for their employees 🙂

[chuckles at Stoner]

[url= http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/content3?mediaId=52100708&catId=600006 ]Royal Mail PO box stuff here[/url]
[url= http://www.usps.com/receive/businesssolutions/poboxservice.htm?from=receiveyourmail&page=poboxservice ]USPS PO box stuff here[/url]

USPS seems to be rather good at this. Although there apparently aren't many countries one would necessarily leap at the chance of living in which have no door-to-door at all. Namibia is cited as an example on Wiki... 🙂

Isn't one of the problems with RM being the breaking of the RM monopoly? Didn't the Government open up the "market" for mail services to "private enterprise", ie a lot of businesses paying employees around minimum wage creaming off the lucrative stuff, therefore wiping out a massive part of the cross subsidy inherent in the RM monopoly and causing the current fall out? Maybe we should just go back to the way it was recreating the monopoly and paying posties a decent wage. A one up for the common weal rather than the "free market."?

I don't think the free market is the best way of allocating resources in a natural monopoly like the postal service. Ref see also Gas, Electricity and Rail networks.

I think you'd go to a model where you rented a PO box in the local office wouldn't you? Your local supermarket or whatever would probably be mad keen to have the boxes as it would bring trade in, so the rental would probably stay reasonably controlled and/or you'd get tie-ins from the junk mail people to subsidise the boxes so that they didn't have to do door-to-door themselves.

I could see this working in filthy London, where everyone is so inured to inconvenience that they would probably walk to work on their hands if they thought it was necessary. For people out in the sticks, no way, look at how many small villages have lost their post office over the past couple of decades.

Re the OP's point, I think this was summed up quite nicely by a Grauniad article the other day, in which they tried to send a letter without using RM. The best price they could get was a shade over six quid. If RM goes, it'll be a major disaster for everyone, with the possible exception of tramps.

GG, I shall remind you of that point of view when Lloyds/RBS announce record profit-based bonus for their employees

You can remind me of how many days there are before Christmas for all I care ..........what's that got to do with the price of rice ?

😕

I think you'd go to a model where you rented a PO box in the local office wouldn't you?

Surely the flaw in that is that you'd need as many PO boxes as households in the area served by the local office, since no-one would have any mail delivered? - That's going to have to be a pretty big 'local' office.

How many millions of households are there in the UK? Boom time for pigeon hole / PO box manufacturers I guess 🙂

Can't see how that is practically possible.

Mr-A, Quite take the point that big cities are a separate case, but people in the country are going somewhere to buy their food and so forth, often fairly frequently. A bit of creative thinking could get their PO boxes into pubs, shops or wherever they're going anyway. Also, the revenue from a post office ont he current model relies on people actually wanting to post things doesn't it? Whereas a PO box rental model relies on people renting a box in the hope of receiving things, so the income is perhaps more predictable and stable.

It would take some getting used to, but I suspect that a lot of the places where home delivery isn't done are places with much worse communications links than much of rural Britain. 🙂

RBS/Lloyds owned by taxpayers (i.e. you)
In order for the tax payer to get the significant investment made on its behalf back, RBS and Lloyds have to be highly profitable and grow massively in market capitalisation as a result for when the government sell down our shares again...
Profit related bonuses in the banking sector are the proven method of growing profitability in the short term in a rising market.
Therefore it is in your/tax-payer's interest for RBS to pay eye-watering bonuses to their bankers. Im sure you wish them well for this bonus cycle....

[i]That's going to have to be a pretty big 'local' office.[/i]

Or a large number of local offices. This is when I wish I knew more about the business. There's all this talk of the "last mile" being the expensive bit that TNT and the rest won't do. If your collection points are serving an area of a square mile it sounds as though that ought to be tolerable and wouldn't involve too vast an office. Think how big the pigeon holes for a block of flats aren't. 🙂

Stoner - I have no idea why you want to talk about banks on this thread.

Try this thread :

http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/how-angry-does-this-make-you

Bimbler, the wage for us posties isnt great, but its OK- the dispute is categorically not about pay.
The ultimate insult about deregulisation is that not only are private and foreign companies allowed to cherrypick profitable mail, but under 'downstream access' they simply hand all mail they cant economically deliver back to us, for a below cost fee, effectivly turning what would be a loss to them into a profit. We absorb the loss!
RM management had a chance to argue against or influence this policy, but chose not to.

BD, that assumes that every local community has a shop or a pub, or that such places are unchanging fixtures of everyday life. Or even that people go to shops - when I was growing up it was a novelty to get your shopping delivered to your home, now it's pretty commonplace.

Well if you've got a remote community where everyone is getting their shopping delivered to their homes then getting their post as well shouldn't, economically or practically, be a problem, should it? 🙂

You could have an address "c/o Ocado delivery ref: X" and your mail would turn up with your quails eggs and foccacia. Limitless possibility. 🙂

Hope you don't feel I'm judging you harshly here Jon, but you don't venture outside London much, do you? And when you do, I'm guessing it's usually to Surrey? 🙂

You're correct, of course. 🙂

I'm not sure it's a killer point, but we'll let you have it. 😉

Removing an institution like the Royal Mail would just be another step in the de-Britishanisation (new word for today) of our fair nation. Yet another step towards anonimity when the United States of Europe finally kicks in. We'll be like the 50th state in the USA that no one can ever remember....
I like the Royal Mail, even after the postie putting my new forks in the wheely bin, and it should be a state subsidised monopoly - why not??

....Delaware is it???

Hope you don't feel I'm judging you harshly here Jon, but you don't venture outside London much, do you? And when you do, I'm guessing it's usually to Surrey?

Not really sure you're getting at but I don't live in London and rarely go there.

He meant me. And he was dead on. 😉

Oh, OK. 😆

The ultimate insult about deregulisation is that not only are private and foreign companies allowed to cherrypick profitable mail, but under 'downstream access' they simply hand all mail they cant economically deliver back to us, for a below cost fee, effectivly turning what would be a loss to them into a profit. We absorb the loss!
RM management had a chance to argue against or influence this policy, but chose not to.

Blimey it's worse than I thought. Thanks wk.

What do we need RM for?* Stealing my Economist every week, otherwise who else would do it?

*-strictly it should of course be 'for what do we need RM?', as one should never use a preposition to end a sentence with. 🙂

You saw the Top Gear race didn't you? The one where they posted a letter in the Scilly Isles then raced it to an address in the Shetlands (or was it Orkneys?)

Either way for a couple of quid special delivery the letter went via plane, lorry, train and van to it's destination and beat a Porsche. That's value for money.

But was it [i]profitable[/i]? 😉

If postman were having such an easy ride and savings could be made quite easily and justifiably,why do ROyal mail bosses refuse to let ACAS resolve the dispute ?